When I read of the death of Rabbi Leon Klenicki last month, I went straight to the bookcases where I keep my treasured volumes. For Rabbi Klenicki’s name is on a little-known 29-page masterwork that has a huge place in my heart (in fact, I contributed toward the costs of its publication in 1995).

More about that later. First, to give you some background, I’d like to introduce you to Rabbi Klenicki. He was a giant in the effort to promote understanding between Christians and Jews. I met him several times but did not know him well. So for his biography, I’ll rely on a long obituary that ran on the top of page A17 of The New York Times of Jan. 31, 2009.

According to the Times, in 1959, Klenicki, a native of Buenos Aires whose parents were Polish immigrants, won a scholarship to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and chose interfaith dialogue as the subject of both his bachelor’s and rabbinical theses.

The obituary continues with some remarkable experiences. A year after his ordination in 1967, he spoke at a gathering of Catholic and Jewish leaders in Bogota, praising their common heritage of the Hebrew scriptures but condemning the history in which “cathedrals were raised to the sky while Jews had to go underground.”

In 1973 he took a post in the U.S. with the Anti-Defamation League as director of Jewish-Catholic relations, which eventually expanded into the realm of interfaith work, including with Protestants. And that is how I know him.

He did everything to promote understanding, producing both a booklet that introduces Jews to Christian history and teachings, and an adapted Passover Haggadah that teaches Christians about the meaning of the Seder. (I have an autographed copy.)

He loved Christians but loved them tough; he and other Jewish and Christian leaders traveled to the Vatican to sit down with Pope John Paul II and criticize his meeting with Kurt Waldheim, former U.N. Secretary General, whose Nazi ties in World War II had just come to light.

Rabbi Klenicki was also present in 2005 for the first meeting of Jewish leaders with Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2007 named the rabbi a Papal Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great.

The rabbi welcomed Christian students on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism but often bluntly named their deficiencies. His obituary described his response to the Vatican document “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” While he called the document a missed opportunity for “a reckoning of the soul,” he also praised the Pope’s administration for issuing it. “The deniers of the Holocaust in Europe now have to deal with the Vatican,” said Rabbi Klenicki.

So, with that declaration that sounds optimistic in light of the current pope’s lifting of a denier’s excommunication, I leave Leon Klenicki’s obituary and return to his little book that means so much to me.

It’s called Jews and Christians: A Dialogue Service About Prayer, and Rabbi Klenicki is its co-author along with Rev. Bruce Robbins. In 1995, the time of publication, Rabbi Klenicki was director of the department of interfaith affairs of the ADL and professor of Jewish theology at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Huntington, N.Y., and Rev. Robbins was head of the General Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns of the United Methodist Church.

But there’s a back story. In the early eighties, my friend and mentor Warren Jacobs was working at the Commission, with the primary portfolio for Christian-Jewish relations. Of course he got to know Leon Klenicki very well, and the two became friends.

In 1983, Warren’s little daughter died of cystic fibrosis. Now he and Leon had a new bond, for Leon was a bereaved parent. So in 1984, they resolved to produce a prayer service in memory of their daughters.

But their collaboration was not to be, for Warren had had a heart attack soon after Patty’s death, and despite his strong will to live he died in 1985, just after his return from Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Leon kept the dream of the prayer service alive, and Warren’s successor picked up the challenge.

One of the thoughts in Jews and Christians: A Dialogue Service About Prayer, borrowed from Hasidic Jewish teaching, is this:

The world was created

by the downward flow of letters.

The task of a person is to form those letters into words

and take them back to God.

The spirits of Myriam Gabriela Klenicki and Patricia Elizabeth Jacobs and J. Warren Jacobs and now Leon Klenicki have all taken their words back to God. But they left a few for me in this slender, precious book.